Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The brilliant editors at GRANTA have just come out with a new issue centered around the provocative title of this post. The writers assembled include Jeannette Winterson, Herta Muller, Dave Eggers, Roberto Bolano, C K Williams, Carl Philips... just to name a few. Remarkable company. And with a really admirable flair, they've commissioned two young British artists (currently showing at the Barbican) to make three micro-films touching upon three of the pieces in the issue. The first film concerns the Bolano; the second, yours truly's essay, "The Unwriteable"; the third, a not-to-be-missed finale, is based on Dave Eggers's "Four Animals Contemplating Sex." Enjoy!

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Now and then I feel a twinge, thinking of Paul and a good four-fifths of the people we know gathered in Denver, all trooping down hotel hallways to panels, gathering in hotel bars, piling into overcrowded cars to go to off-site readings, comparing notes on the psychic weirdness of being in a strange city with a good percentage of the writers in America. This is the first AWP conference I've missed in a while. Truly my system just rebelled at the thought of doing it again so soon after last year; Chicago felt like a kind of psychological boot camp, as if we were all slogging together through some difficult period of being in a community so large, vibrating and edgeless that it seemed to swallow all individual life. Everyone's always trying to analyze what's so strange about the experience of the conference: a vast number of fundamentally introverted people in one place, a social situation that makes everyone want to feel known and recognized, and then makes the known and recognized want to run and hide. These are true but not entirely an adequate explanation of the existential peculiarity of it.

One thing that makes it feel like a wild ride for me is that it's like attending many reunions at once. In one hour, I have encountered friends from high school, from grad school, from practically every writing program I ever taught in, and from a great many of the schools I've visited over the years. All streaming toward me in random order, full of good-natured greetings, excited to reconnect. Which excites me, too, until I begin to feel like a large wave that has gathered strength all day and then broken on the shore in one big shatter of foam and bubbles. I feel just like the speaker in Whitman's incredibly desolate poem, As I Ebbd with the Ocean of Life -- which ends with poet looking down to see himself on the shore as nothing more than a scatter of seafoam and straw.

Though of course I have to admit that I miss the elation and exhaustion of it. A little. But not enough to come to Denver. Love to all of you there!